Conversations of Today

After discussing the introduction we must compose for our next assignment due Friday at noon, we switched the conversation around to talk about conclusions in papers, and how to be scholarly in writing one. Bill explains that all good papers end with an awareness of future research to be done. That conclusions are just as significant as the middle of a paper because it requires more rhetorical thinking. We discussed how students out of high school like to write a paper by stating a problem, and decide to end it with how it should be fixed and that there’s nothing more to it; as if they know the solution and there’s no more research or thinking to be done. This is being unscholarly. In good scholarly papers, they will always end the paper with what they still don’t know yet. You the writer are indeed putting forth your knowledge, but are only a small aspect of the problem as a whole. As a writer, it’s important to know that there are many interdisciplinary areas of all human problems. In other words, you yourself can’t fix a problem all on your own because you just can’t be disciplined or an expert in every different area of a problem; you need lots of help from lots of different entities. Acknowledging that there are still many questions that still need to be asked is important. You want to be humble with your conclusions for knowing there’s more work to be done. This conversation in class was very interesting to me because I believe I was one of those students that didn’t do this, and point out that, as Bill said, there’s “interagency cooperation” in every worlds issues and every agency has their own discipline.

The second conversation that my fellow scholars and I discussed in class today was that learning information is better learned when you do something with the information after you learned it. Like let say in this class, when we discussed something in the class, then were asked to write about it in the class, and then again to reflect upon it, and then lastly to write about it again publicly on a blog; the learning went much deeper and now I know (at least for myself), that the information I learned will last longer. It is just a fact that for significant learning to happen, we have to do something with what we’ve learned in class, right after class, to better learn and understand the material. This is because consuming information is much different form learning to think of the information. In other words, consuming material comes much faster than to actually learn what you are consuming (slower). All of my fellow scholars came up with several different ways in which this could be done.

Most of which everyone agreed on was doing some reflection or summary of what your had learned in class afterwards in writing. Whether it be for 5-10 minutes on a blog, just a little in your notebook after the class, or sometime at the end of the day or the week. April was interesting to hear say that it helps her rewrite her notes all over again to deeper understand the information. Bill, however, ended the class with a very unique way to recall what you had learned in your classes. Everyone has a phone, and on that phone (usually), is a tape recorder. So in-between each class you could simply talk about what you had learned and put into your own words what the information was about, then later go back and listen to your recordings. He illustrates that not only can writing be useful, but listening to your own voice can be very helpful as well.

Both long conversations in class were very interesting to me today, and now that I am at this moment recalling on everything I have learned today in this blog, I know I will better my understanding and learning of the information, and have it be incorporated into my brain for longer.